Dian Mueller, Author at Toward Freedom

Feminism’s Unfinished Business (Editorial: 3/98)

Dian Mueller June 2, 2005 Dian Mueller

Twenty years ago, I was coming of age as “second-wave feminism” was hitting its stride. A national Equal Rights Amendment seemed like a do-able accomplishment and helped galvanize activists. The UN had recently declared International Women’s Year, and women were empowered by participating in a movement whose numbers seemed to swell every year.

Feminism was revived. The “first-wave” feminists had achieved passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, granting women the right to vote. But the voting public was still largely middle- and upper-class, and didn’t produce the revolutionary change that socialist suffragists had sought. And since so much effort had been focused on suffrage, once it was obtained, activism dwindled until it was all but non-existent. read more

The Peace of Peace (3/00)

Dian Mueller June 1, 2005 Dian Mueller

"Our power to empower is perhaps the most important role we can play in the 21st century. The more individuals who feel empowered to work in their own systems for peace and conflict transformation, the closer the world comes to that critical mass that will allow for a massive leap of consciousness, allowing new processes for peace that were previously unimaginable to become normative, and easy." – Louise Diamond

Transformation is the name of the game with Dr. Louise Diamond. When I met her in the mid-1970s, she was Louise Lindner, a psychotherapist in Burlington, Vermont. Although her work with my mother was very important in my life, the most profound impact came when I visited her in the hospital when she had cancer. Yet, the courage and joy with which she lived her life in those stark circumstances inspired and aided me immeasurably when I was later called upon to serve as a death midwife for my father. Confronted with death, she strove to be "full of joy, full of love, full of peace." read more

India’s Holy Wars (8/00)

Dian Mueller May 30, 2005 Dian Mueller

India is in deep turmoil on a number of religious fronts. While the mainstream press focuses mainly on the conflict between predominantly Hindu India and predominantly Muslim Pakistan over the threatened separation of the Indian Jammu and Kashmir state, the death toll rises in other parts of the country as internecine war widens.

Muslim-Hindu Clashes

On Jun 25, a bomb exploded in a mosque in Guntur, Andhra Pradesh, injuring two people. An ensuing riot injured five more, including a TV crew. This led to a one-week curfew in Muslim-dominant areas of Guntur and the state capital, Hyderabad, where police guarded both mosques and churches. It was yet another sad chapter in the boiling conflict between Indian Muslims and Hindus. read more